i heard that you like the bad girls, honey, is that true?

[rhinemaid]

Who: Ilde & Ivan
What: They aren't avoiding one another.
Where: Sonja and llde's villa.
When: After this conversation.
Notes: Anna helpfully gave me blanket permission to have Angus saunter in and out of Ilde's logs and threads as I please.
Warnings: Mentions of (someone else's) suicide attempts.

Giving Ivan her address is less of a conscious act of trust than it is a conscious desire not to trek halfway across the city if she can make him come to her instead; if she thought about it she'd probably say that she trusts Ivan to act in Ivan's own best interests, and she's more confident than Cindy likes that she can accurately keep track of what those are. They've long since passed the point where she feels obliged to justify it in her own head, a detail that she occasionally takes out and examines to no satisfying end. She's used to him, now - it's convenient to her that he continues to be around, and it'd annoy her if he wasn't. Most of the time, he is around, she's not annoyed (at him- well, usually-), and it's not something that she's required to examine.

The cruorvore population in the city just dropped by sixty percent overnight. It's all right to have been a little concerned about what might have happened. She hasn't heard from Katherine yet, either, and that's a nagging worry in her mind that's a bit less complicated.

"It's normal to be concerned about people you know," she informs Angus, scooping him up in her arms with apparent unconcern for whether or not Sonja (who may or may not be home) overhears her talking to the cat that keeps letting himself into their house whenever he spies a window open or a door ajar. "I'm not the one being weird in this scenario." The scenario where she's talking to a cat about relationship drama she isn't having? Totally not weird. A pause. "Don't look at me like that."

Carrying him downstairs against her chest, Ilde waits until she's all the way down the front steps before she sets him down (to better avoid being immediately followed back inside). "Get," she says, succinctly, if fondly. "You don't live here."

Comments

[rhinemaid]

"You died before you came here," she recalls, stretching and shifting until she's got her knees draped over his lap, reclining length-ways on the sofa they're currently occupying. Whatever conversations they do and don't have, Ivan's presumably well used to the fact that personal space is a concept she has no truck with.

[deservesadaisy]

"I did." He doesn't, however, go into any details. His death - both of them, really - they were private things that he was not about to go into if he didn't fully trust her. He cared about her more than he was probably admitting, but trust was still tricky.

"I do rather wonder, if I die here, will I turn up in some other closed city? It could just be a series of nesting dolls, at the end of it."

[rhinemaid]

Tempting as it is to push the subject, Ilde doesn't; he doesn't seem interested in going into detail and she can tell when a door is being closed, at least. It's not really her business, just because she's curious.

(But she is very curious.)

"That's an odd sort of afterlife." Starting again and again and again and again...

[deservesadaisy]

"I think it's odd that there's any sort of afterlife at all, yet one with people here who haven't died," he said, lightly. The fact remained; he was sure he had died, before Baedal.

[rhinemaid]

"Not really an afterlife at all." Just a place where sometimes dead people got less dead? That didn't make significantly more sense than the alternative, she supposed, but there were a lot of things that played into this city she didn't have any kind of context to make sense of. The inherent fact of their abduction, for starters.

[deservesadaisy]

"Not as such. It's still terribly odd." He slid his hand up her ankle and a short way up her calf. "I just wonder where people go when they die here, now and then."

[rhinemaid]

Ilde's toes flex, her ankle rolling under his hand as she sinks a little lower and bends her knees. "Maybe they don't go anywhere. Maybe it's a dead end."

She thinks of Finnegan, briefly, and smiles- it's a tiny, humourless, cruel smile.

[deservesadaisy]

"Just as likely as not." It would appeal to him in as much as he'd have been right about there being nothing after, almost.

[rhinemaid]

"Souls can be kept. Trapped." She's seen it done- she's thinking of it being done to someone right now, it always makes her feel a little bit better about life. (Fuck that man and the horse he rode in on.) "Maybe that's part of how they do it, for the city. Maybe it doesn't matter if you're dead or alive."

She nudges him with her knee, shifting. "So maybe, if they're so important here, they don't go anywhere because they aren't allowed. What happens to people who aren't in the city any more? If there's no way out, why do some people just go missing? Their CiD stops working. They're not in the city any more. What happens?"

...well.

[deservesadaisy]

"So almost a corporal ghost; your spirit's kept tethered, but it's not only your spirit." He'd clearly not shown any of the physical effects of his most recent death; on the other hand, he hasn't been reset to human, either. It raises questions about the way the mechanics of the place works that he hasn't yet worked out.

[rhinemaid]

"Maybe." There's no real proof in any direction of exactly what's going on, or how it's done- but it's a theory, and it's something. If there's any truth to it, then maybe there'll be a way to figure that out. To cut whatever ties that bind... "Maybe," she repeats, quieter.

[deservesadaisy]

He slides his hand up her leg, absently thoughtful as he considers.

[rhinemaid]

Ilde lets it lie at that, for the time being- it's all just increasingly morbid speculation at this point, and there's not much more she can find out about the inner workings of Baedal from Ivan's lap. Instead, eventually, she stirs with a new question: "Did you get anything interesting from your post?"

She did notice what his message was attached to, even if she didn't respond to it.

[deservesadaisy]

"I did. I don't know how useful, but interesting. A couple other vampires looking for support - one angry. Your friend Cynthia gave her two cents." He smiled a bit, opaque but amused.

[rhinemaid]

"She's not a fan." Which is one reason Ilde doesn't want to worry her with it when she's fussing about what she is or isn't doing with Ivan; she's relatively certain Cindy's advice would consist of stop fucking damn vampires, then. Not actually bad advice, viewed objectively.

[deservesadaisy]

"I know. It's why I didn't bother to tell her who I was." Ivan had seen no reason he needed to.

[rhinemaid]

Leaving that aside - there's not much else to say on the subject, and at least Ilde doesn't think Cindy really likes or trusts any group in the city over another - she considers him for a moment, picking at the hem of her dress in idleness. "Angry seems more your speed."

Under the circumstances.

[deservesadaisy]

"Make no mistake, I've enough sympathy. He's very new, apparently. I'm not sure where I'm throwing my lot in, but at least he's not cowering." Not that he can't understand the impulse to do so, even if he doesn't at all share it.

[rhinemaid]

"Are you going to talk to him again, then?" She has an interest here, she doesn't pretend otherwise- the likelihood that all of these things bothering her are connected keeps her in motion with it, even when she's spending her days teaching wealthy xenian children to play the piano.

[deservesadaisy]

He tilts his head at her. "I was thinking about it. Why?"

[rhinemaid]

"Because it interests me." Of course. Putting her cigarette out, she says, "How people are responding. What they make of it. I'd like to know."

[deservesadaisy]

"I still want to know who planned the bloody mess and why," he says, frankly. "It's going to take more digging, though."

[rhinemaid]

"It fits the Candlelighters, so far." What they know of them already-- which is frustratingly little, except that they're boring, thorough and like to read Jane fucking Austen. "The 'concerned citizens' propaganda reads a lot like some of what we found. You've got copies."

She has to remind herself that they don't know enough, that she shouldn't get too fixated on one solution in case she's wrong, but, well. It's right there.

[deservesadaisy]

"I saw; there were definitely some echoes. What's unclear is what it gained them. They don't seem to be an organization to do anything without a plan." He leans back. "Even if it wasn't them, this was orchestrated. Purposeful. I spoke with someone who suggested it creates the opportunity for another crurovore to seize power, but I don't think that fits, not alone at least."

[rhinemaid]

"There are less shoddy ways of taking out your competition," she says, blandly- Ivan's stronger now than he was before, and among the survivors he can't be the only one. Playing 'survival of the fittest' doesn't seem like such a smart way to reshuffle the balance of power, to her eye. Maybe that's just her. "You sleep like the dead when you're drunk, I could find a less stupid way of killing you--"